Partisan politics have gotten in the way of celebrating our country’s 250th birthday.
The Democrats have opted out of the festivities because they insist everything we do should be about Donald Trump – and the president, let’s face it, doesn’t exactly disagree with that idea.
Many mourn the decline of comity and consensus, and look back to some golden age — say, the 1976 bicentennial — when all Americans held hands and celebrated the anniversary as one.
Put aside the fact that 1976 was part of an awful decade, replete with bombings, assassinations, and protests.
I believe our disagreements over the 250th birthday party prove that American politics still have a pulse. Our debates about the future may be distempered in their emotional tone and alarmist in their rhetoric, but they still matter — America’s future, now, as always, is wide open.
The most important question, which few have asked, is what exactly we should be celebrating.
It isn’t survival. Mere endurance is remarkable in frail individuals, but nations should stand for something more than just being there.
‘Created Equal’
As it happens, the people who, 250 years ago, produced the document we are celebrating — the Declaration of Independence — left no doubt about the significance of what they had done.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” they began.
There followed a series of extraordinary assertions.
All men — today we would say, all persons — “are created equal.” All are endowed with “unalienable” rights. Among these rights are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Government exists not to wage great wars or extract wealth from the population but to “secure these rights.”
And when government fails to do this, “it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”
That was the Founder’s Creed.
The United States fought a bloody conflict to tear itself apart from Great Britain in an attempt to realize this faith — that government can be justified only when it rests on the self-evident truth of the rights and freedoms of ordinary people.
When, many years later, mourning the dead at the battlefield in Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln stated that our nation was “dedicated” to a “proposition,” it was the Founder’s Creed he meant.
And every Fourth of July, with fireworks and barbeques, we commemorate the miraculous “new birth of freedom” America represents.
Even with the best will imaginable, however, those who reflect on the matter soon begin to ask troubling questions.
Given the vast distance between, say, a homeless person and Elon Musk, in what sense can we say that human equality is self-evident?
Since our rights and freedoms can be trampled on by the government and other powerful institutions, how can we describe them as inalienable?
Could the Founders have misrepresented the reality of this world — was their Creed an incredibly naïve, or clever, or even tendentious story to justify the seizing of power from Britain?
Was America built on an intellectual foundation of sand?
The short answer is: No.
Everything hinges on the meaning of that first word in the phrase: “created equal.”
It doesn’t mean we’re identical or interchangeable. It certainly doesn’t imply equality of outcomes.
Human Condition
We are simply told that, in some initial sense, we enter the world in a state of unassailable equality.
We all share in the human condition. We are all susceptible to hunger, pain, and death, and we all desire happiness, success, and love.
But the Founders meant more than that — and here things get tricky for us skeptical denizens of the 21st century.
We are equal, the Founders believed, on a transcendental plane, where all accidental differences are erased: in the eyes of God.
Human beings, they wrote, are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” It’s in this sense that we are “created” equal.
You and I, like every other individual, as spiritual entities, are judged by the Creator to be of equal value and dignity from the onset of life.
This is true of the homeless person as it is of Elon Musk.
And this gift from an eternal source can’t be snatched away the passions of mortal humanity: it is sacred and inalienable.
Yet a decreasing number of Americans believe in the rational Christian God of the Founders. Among the hyper-educated elites who run our institutions and manage the national narrative, the number probably approaches zero.
Will unbelief bring the 250-year-old edifice of the Founder’s Creed crashing down on our heads?
The short answer is: Not necessarily.
But beware — there are those who wish to make it so.
A movement is afoot to redefine American democracy as something quite the opposite from a community of equals.
Aristocracy
On this view, there are two inferior classes: the deplorables, who seek to oppress the weak and persecute the marginalized, and the victims, who like helpless infants are destined to be crushed by the oppressors.
A third class emerges as the hero of this new-model democracy: a credentialed aristocracy, wise in expertise and pure in virtue, whose task it is to protect the victims by putting the deplorables in their place.
Because the deplorables often achieve a majority, the voters must be presented with few choices.
If an undesirable candidate begins to gain in popularity, a rule or law must be found to disqualify him from running.
If no rule applies, he must be prosecuted on some fictitious criminal charge.
If the candidate survives prosecution, the media will unleash a storm of scandal about his private and public life.
If, despite the best efforts of the aristocracy, the unwanted candidate is elected, he must be denied office and flung back into the muck.
To my knowledge, this has yet to happen in the US — though we came close in 2016 with the Russia collusion story, concocted to overturn the result of that year’s presidential elections.
But it happened in Romania in 2024. It is poised to happen again in alleged democracies as varied as those of Germany and Brazil.
And yes — it can happen here. Every other ruse has already been tried.
The aristocrats who are redefining democracy maintain that the Founder’s Creed is nothing more than antique clutter, getting in the way of true justice.
Not only are our rights and freedoms alienable — they must be alienated, otherwise the deplorables will overrun society like a barbarian horde.
Not only is equality between citizens not self-evident — it is false and an empty concept anyway, to be replaced with “equity,” the mathematical balancing of all racial, sexual, and identitarian outcomes as determined by the ruling class.
Obviously, for the aristocratic principle to qualify as democracy, traditional notions of what democracy has always been must be discredited.
The whole history of the United States, with its myriad triumphs of ordinary people and millions of immigrants like myself who have found a new birth of freedom here, must be trashed as racist and exploitive.
The Founders in particular, whose courage and brilliance set us on this course two and a half centuries ago, must be derided as loathsome white males.
Such a war on memory can only lead to a pathological hatred of all things American.
And sure enough, these are the Ivy League university students who can be heard proclaiming “Death to America” alongside their Islamist allies.
Wide-open future
A famous movie star has told us that loving our country is like an abused spouse loving her abuser.
A recently nominated Democratic candidate for Congress has boasted that she wipes her dirty hands with the American flag.
With this charming alternative in mind, let me return to the question of whether current unbelief in some way nullifies the Founder’s Creed.
It should be a trivial truth to say that the arrow of causation moves from past to present.
As Americans, we are what the Founder’s Creed has made us.
It’s the equivalent of our sociopolitical DNA.
Earthbound latter-day citizens, those of us who are skeptics or unbelievers, are swept upward by the transcendental impulse of the founding generation – for us, as for them, equality of rights will forever appear self-evident.
Is the American system in part imperfect or unjust?
Of course it is — but the adventure remains incomplete.
America’s future, I repeat, is wide open — an endless frontier in which, with luck, freedom will continue to be reborn.
So here are our choices.
We can cease to be Americans and become something else — an aristocracy masquerading as a fake democracy, for example.
That would be the hope of the haters, and it is certainly a possibility.
But if we want to live up to the 250 years of our history, we should light the fuses of the starbursts and fire up the grills in celebration of the great souls that came before us, and in anticipation that their faith still has long to run.